Much has been made over China bypassing the U.S. recently to become the world’s largest crude oil importer and even more media attention has been given to the ongoing trade dispute between Washington and Beijing, yet amid all of the geopolitical posturing and associated media coverage, there is another development in China that could be just as important for global oil markets – China’s corporate debt quandary. In an effort to continue spurring China’s decades-long run of stellar economic growth, banks opened the flood gates with loans worth trillions of dollars to the country’s corporate giants, prompting Chinese President Xi Jinping to tighten the screws on both legitimate banks and the so-called murky world of shadow banking. This belt tightening has now entered its third year. The ratio of Chinese corporate debt to GDP is already very high by international standards – at 168 percent in 2017, Fitch Ratings […]